I’m about to make a point about the Neil Gaiman scandal. After doing so, I’ll have to engage in some elaborate cleanup, after which I’ll provide a bit of philosophy.
So, to start, one of Gaiman’s accusers says the writer spent about two-and-a-half years sexually abusing her, a situation that she says she couldn’t escape because of financial factors. The woman “had no income at the time and was borrowing money from her sister to get by,” reports New York magazine’s bombshell article about the Gaiman mess. “She worried that if she didn’t appease Gaiman, he’d kick her out of her house and then she and her three daughters would have nowhere to go.”
The article closes on a hopeful note, telling us that the woman and two other accusers “gathered around a bonfire at the Athens home of the musician Michael Stipe,” described as “an old friend” of the woman. Stipe, of course, isn’t just any musician. He was lead singer of R.E.M., one of the best-known rock groups of the past 40 years. Gaiman’s very rich; Stipe would appear to be much, much richer (do a “net worth” Google and $75 million comes back as the consensus pick for Stipe; for Gaiman it’s $20 million). Why didn’t the woman borrow from her rich friend and get the hell out of her trap? A similar question applies to another accuser, who we’re told had been homeless for a while and needed a roof overhead. We’re also told she was friends with a couple who did have a roof overhead. Why didn’t she stay on their couch for a bit? We don’t know and we ought to, and that’s the point I want to make.
Now the cleanup. A series of furious women tell much the same story about falling into Gaiman’s clutches, and his response contains at least one lie and rests on a glaring implausibility (see the top and bottom of the article here). I don’t believe Gaiman, nor do I see my two query points as holes in the accusers’ stories; instead they’re gaps in the magazine’s account. The article, at almost 11,500 words, gets in a lot of information and detail. Maybe there wasn’t room for everything, but there should’ve been room for these questions and their answers.
Maybe the couple’s place was too small. Maybe Stipe and his friend had fallen out of touch and they didn’t reconnect until last year, when Tortoise Media first revealed her accusations. I guess, maybe. Really I ought to know. So should anyone who read the article, and they should notice that they don’t. But after looking at hours and hours and hours of responses to the piece, I’ve come across exactly nobody who’s remarked on these gaps. Here we run into a perennial problem: people care about believing, not knowing. I believe the accusers, but I’d rather know they’re right than believe they’re right. As much as I’d like a world in which men don’t abuse helpless women, I’m also partial toward a world in which people point at a sizable hole in a crucial news account and say, “Hey, what about that?” without any thought to which side the answer will help.
More cleanup. The New York article relays three accusations that Gaiman engaged in sexual activity while his infant son was in the room. In my recap of the article I said it was clear that Gaiman’s people had denied the worst of the three allegations but that it wasn’t clear if they’d denied the other two. I was wrong. All three denials are there, it’s just that two of them appear in different paragraphs than the accusations they’re denying. Of these two, one might have been more definite about what it applied to. But I expect most people got the idea.
The rundown goes this way. The worst of the three charges, that Gaiman penetrated an accuser while his son was present, is followed at paragraph’s end by “Gaiman’s representatives say these allegations are ‘false, not to mention, deplorable.’” I now take it that “these allegations” applies not just to the many details in that paragraph but also to the accusations in the paragraph before, notably that he felt up the woman’s breasts while she, Gaiman, and his son all sat on the sofa. Another allegation, this one by the friend of Michael Stipe, is that Gaiman forced the woman’s hand onto his penis while his son was there. The response comes along at the end of the next paragraph, but it leaves no doubt as to meaning: “Gaiman’s representatives… deny that he engaged in any sexual activity with her in the presence of his son.”
I suppose what’s missing is a denial that Gaiman performed any sort of sex act around his son or any other child. But all right. In one case I was overcareful about wording, in the other I was careless about double checking. I do appear to have been right about a discrepancy between the New York article and Tortoise Media’s account, which says nothing about Gaiman’s son being around during sex acts. Since Tortoise is a British outfit, I speculated that UK libel laws cut into its leeway. One of the Tortoise reporters now says that was the case. With the appearance of the New York article, Rachel Johnson praised the piece and tweeted that it “includes many details of alleged child abuse, sexual assault and rape that we were unable to publish thanks to Britain’s tougher libel laws.”
I still wish the article spelled out whether the reporter did any checking beyond “contemporaneous diary entries, texts and emails with friends, messages between Gaiman and the women, and police correspondence.” If we’re told that Gaiman’s then-wife flew across the planet to take their son away from him, we should know whether somebody made sure this was true. “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” I overhead a newsroom sage tell a young reporter. A horrendous amount of work for an article of this size, but I’m naïve enough to think that’s what the writer should’ve done.